Tired eyes and sore muscles. 60-year-old Giorgio Speranza used to regard that an inevitable companion during harvest. Not anymore. He recently tested the Fendt IDEAL combine equipped with IDEALDrive – a machine you steer with a joystick, not a traditional steering wheel. “Probably my most relaxed harvesting experience ever,” he says. A modern combine is a moving factory consisting of roughly 7,000 components. It takes skill for the farmer to turn it around, once he gets to the edge of the field. Typically, he must turn the steering wheel lock to lock on average four times before he is back on auto-steering harvesting the next row in the other direction. Soon, though, this will be a thing of the past – with IDEALDrive he will be able to steer the machine just by moving his left hand a centimeter or two. Enter: IDEALDrive. The Fendt IDEAL 10T – launched at Agritechnica 2019 ¬– has no steering wheel. Instead, the farmer performs necessary manual steering operations with a left-hand joystick. The result is better visibility, less fatigue, higher productivity.

Farmer Andrea Sandrini was a bit skeptical about the notion of joystick steering before first taking the driver’s seat. “I am positively surprised. The joystick reacts fast and precisely to my hand movements. Steering this way is very easy. I really like it,” he says. The farmer was equally enthusiastic about the solution – but for other reasons. Only 24 years old, sore joints and tired eyes is not yet a concern of his. “The visibility is very good and you sit comfortably. But I am more impressed by the speed you can now turn with at the edge of the field. With the joystick, it takes just a few seconds. So you save time at every turn. And for me as a farmer, every second counts. I never know when the weather turns bad and I have to postpone harvesting,” he says.